Katie Thorn

I never meant to stay. I knew how to take care of myself, how to hide my skin from the lusty young fishermen who danced with us on the rocky shore. He was different from the rest, but still, I knew not to trust him.

He left a piece of himself in me and stole my skin when I fell asleep in his arms.

It would not be born right. I’d heard tales of children with cracked green skin, hands webbed like fins, lungs drowning in the thick air. Sjóskrímsli, they were called. Sea monsters. No mother with a heart could bring such a creature into the world. I tried every remedy and superstition traded in the fishwives’ market, but with each day my belly grew rounder and my call to the sea grew stronger.

The day Magnë found me facedown in the water, my hair spreading like tendrils of dark seaweed, we left Halldórsskora, moving inland until the scent of smoke drowned out the salt air that echoed in my lungs like a broken promise.

They say the closest a land woman will ever get to this feeling is if she loses a child, but I have lost both son and sea, and they are not alike in feel or form. I missed living by the ocean. “Miss.” Words cannot translate what it is like to be held out of reach of one’s very being. I did not blame the child within me, but neither did I feel any affection for the sníkjudýr that kept me tied to my fisherman. Alone, I might have stood a chance of finding my way home to the sea.

Magnë gave in before the child came. A fisherman is no use without fish to catch. We returned to the sea, but try as I might, I couldn’t find where he’d hidden my skin. The night my son was born, I gave up looking.

Strönd was born healthy and strong like his father, but Magnë couldn’t see what I could. My boy was like me. His eyes shone stormy turquoise like the sea that had cradled me, and when his cries drove the moon out of the sky, only the restless rustle of waves slicing against the sand could calm him.

A fisherboy for a fisherman, Magnë told me when our son grew sturdy and tall. They spent their days in the boat and I spent mine upending furniture and prying up floorboards. Searching for what Magnë had stolen from me and the child I’d never asked for.

I woke last night to find Strönd’s bed empty, the quilt crumpled on the floor. His footprints led down to the shore where Magnë found me. The sea was already stealing his steps from the sand. Strönd stood, gazing straight ahead. He did not turn as I approached. I did not call to him as he waded out. A wave broke, and when it melted back into the inky sea, he was gone.

He cannot survive without a skin. What was taken from me, I could not give him.

I knelt, the frigid sea tugging my hands. As I followed my path back across the sand, my foot caught on the ragged edge of a rock. I lifted it, measuring the weight in my hand.